Carlos Rodón Gives the Yankees a Pair of Aces

Nine down, one to go. The 2022 free-agent signing period has been fast and furious. When Carlos Correa signed with the Giants earlier this week, he was the eighth of my top 10 free agents to sign. That breakneck pace hasn’t slowed. On Thursday night, Carlos Rodón and the Yankees agreed to a six-year, $162 million contract, as Jon Heyman first reported.

I pre-wrote some words on Rodón as a player, so let’s get to those before discussing the broader context of his signing. He’s a fascinating story, and yet simultaneously a very straightforward pitcher. He throws an overpowering fastball. He throws an overpowering slider. He throws them both very hard, and with solid accuracy. It sounds almost too simple, but both pitches are spectacular, and they pair well together. He’s going to throw them; the question is whether batters can hit them.

For the past two years, the answer has been a resounding no. In 2021, you could convince yourself it was just a hot streak. Rodón missed most of 2019 and ’20 due to injury, and he’d been roughly league average before that. The peripherals were excellent, and the pedigree was there — he was the third overall pick in the 2014 draft after a standout college career at North Carolina State — but he was a two-pitch pitcher with health concerns and one excellent season. To make matters worse, he looked fatigued at the end of the season — reasonably so given his workload increase — and lost fastball velocity until regaining it in the playoffs. The White Sox declined to issue him a qualifying offer, and he signed what was essentially a high-class prove-it deal with the Giants: two years and $44 million, with an opt out after the first year.

In 2022, he proved it. With the velocity he now possesses — he sits 94–96 mph and tops out around 100 — his fastball misses bats up in the zone with great frequency. It also generates a ton of pop ups, because batters are consistently under it. It’s the kind of pitch you can use with two strikes to end an at-bat, or while behind in the count to set things up. He also clearly has a little extra in the tank when he needs it; he’s Verlander-esque in amping up his fastball as the game goes on.

The real star of the show, in my eyes, is his slider. It’s not exactly a bullet slider, but it’s not exactly sweeping either. It runs to his arm side and dips at the same time, diving in at righty hitters and vanishing on lefties. He locates it on the low arm-side corner consistently, and the combination of velocity (mid-80s), movement, and location consistently leaves batters flummoxed. He can also take a little off of it and give it curveball shape, which he does more frequently against righties.

If you’re wondering what an 80-grade pitch looks like, Rodón’s slider is a good example. Watch him in a game, watch hitters attempt to react to its disorienting break, and you’ll get it. A number of years ago, at a restaurant in Buenos Aires named Las Pizarras, I had some asparagus that blew my mind. “Oh,” I thought. “This is what asparagus should taste like. I never knew.” That’s Rodón’s slider. It’s the platonic ideal, and other sliders are shadows on a cave wall.

You might not believe a two-pitch pitcher can work as an elite starter, but another former Giant, Kevin Gausman, just put together an excellent season in the AL East on the back of two and a half pitches, much like Rodón will attempt to do next year. Sure, yeah, you’d love to have Darvish-esque range and options, but with two pitches this good, Rodón doesn’t need another. He’ll always be better against lefties than righties, but think of it this way: it’s not that he’s bad against righties, it’s that he’s unhittable against lefties. His slider is an excellent pitch for getting right-handers out. It’s a nice bonus that it turns lefties into a bowlful of jello.

That’s Rodón the pitcher. I’m pretty interested in what Rodón means for the Yankees, though. If you kept up with the pitching moves they’ve made over the past two years, you might think they were bargain shoppers. They’ve been very good at developing options internally, and when they did leave the organization, they went for Jameson Taillon types: solid but hardly aces. Frankie Montas fits this category as well. The Yankees’ bullpen is reliably spectacular, Gerrit Cole is an ace, Luis Severino is effective when healthy, and Nestor Cortes was a delightful surprise. For the most part, though, the team focused on hitting talent when adding via trade or free agency.

In signing Rodón, the Yankees are making it clear that their previous behavior was opportunistic, not dogmatic. When there was a chance to get a difference-making pitcher, they had the money and desire to get it done. It also gives them an enviable amount of depth; pitching health is never a guarantee, and adding another top-line starter means that the team’s minor league system is still stocked with contributors who can come up to the big leagues if needed.

This is the kind of move that the Yankees should be making given their budgetary advantages. They ran out to an early lead in the division last year and held on at the end, but the Blue Jays and Rays aren’t going away. There’s no guarantee that Cortes will repeat his season, or that they’ll be able to replicate the offensive contributions that Matt Carpenter and Andrew Benintendi added when healthy. By signing Rodón, the Yankees have pushed back out ahead of the rest of the division, and given themselves a good shot at an all-important playoff bye.

Just how much will Rodón help them? ZiPS thinks he’ll be one of the best ten or so pitchers in baseball next year before gracefully declining over the course of the deal:

ZiPS would have offered Rodón $150 million over the course of this contract, quite close to the actual deal he signed. It’s actually the more pessimistic of the two projections we host here at FanGraphs; Steamer projects him for 4.7 WAR and rates him as the third-best starter in baseball. There will always be lingering injury concerns — he’s a pitcher, after all — but he’s comfortably worthy of being called an ace. That’s a meaningful risk given his history, but it’s one I’d be willing to take as the Yankees. No pitcher is a paragon of health; that’s just not how it works these days. I’d rather take a risk on quantity than quality, particularly given the team’s depth options, and I like what they’ve done in terms of workload management with their relievers, which makes me optimistic that they’ll be able to do the same for Rodón.

It’s a good thing that the Yankees signed Rodón, because they were running out of impactful options. When they sat out the very top of the shortstop market, they cut themselves off from easy position player improvements. They could use an outfielder to give them more depth there, but I don’t like any of the remaining options meaningfully more than incumbent Oswaldo Cabrera. Dansby Swanson is uninspiring given their organizational context; he’s a tier down from the Correa/Turner/Bogaerts trio, and Anthony Volpe might be arriving soon. There are no catchers to be had. If they wanted to get breathing room in the East, it was Rodón or a trade.

That’s true for plenty of teams. Rodón’s signing is a convenient marker for a new phase of free agency. Before he signed, plenty of fans could dream of their team making a big splash by combining Rodón and the best remaining hitter that fit their roster. With him gone, though, that’s not quite so easy. Nathan Eovaldi is the next-best starter on the market, and he’s not the same caliber of arm.

If you’re on the outside looking in, it just got much harder to change your fortunes meaningfully this year. Hope springs eternal, but it springs a lot more eternal when you can add a Cy Young contender with nothing more than a checkbook. I don’t mean to say that teams are done trying to get better, but the degree by which they’re getting better will be lower for the remainder of the offseason.

In that sense, it’s a great capstone move by Brian Cashman. His AL East rivals drew closer to him over the winter, particularly the Blue Jays. By signing Rodón, he’s not only climbed to the roof, but also pulled the ladder up behind him. You can’t win a 2023 pennant in December 2022, but to the extent that front office maneuvering during the hot stove season adds to a team’s championship odds, I sure like this maneuver. This felt like a position where the Yankees would be justified in an overpay given their position in the division. The fact that it’s a market-rate contract makes it even better.